Speaker profile
Mr Owen Gwynne
Available for booking
Runcorn, Cheshire, England
40 miles travel distance
Amateur Astronomer
Summary
From age 10 loved explaining planets & the stars to people. Never stopped.
Full biography
Having started in primary school with 'a project' on the planets, I continued to have an interest while at school
This resulted with me studying Astronomy at University.
On graduating, I took a PGCE and spent 5 years teaching Physics/Science. On leaving teaching, I had 35 years in IT before retiring. Member of Mid Cheshire Astro Group and serving as Chair since 2020. As Chair, I aim to give one talk per year.
Affiliations
Lectures
Edmund Halley
More than just the Comet Man, Edmund Halley was a remarkable scholar and driver of the development of science in the years after the Great Fire of London
Archaeo-astronomy of the Sun and Moon
Inspired by the Major Lunar Standstill of 2024-5, this talk looks at what we know about how early people responded to the movements of the Sun, and in particular the Moon.
How we didn't get to the Moon
A deliberately provocative title, this is actually how early science fiction (dating back to Roman era) proposed we might reach there. Having covered how we didn't get to the Moon, the talk summarises how we actually managed it
A minute of your time
Inspired by learning that a 15th C astronomer found that his astronomical tables predicted an eclipse that he actually measured to come 8 minutes early, I was struck by wondering how in fact he was able to measure time with an accuracy of minutes, when mechanical clocks weren't able to track time that accurately for another Century or more. Where did we get our days, months, weeks, hours, minutes and seconds.
10 Unconventional Telescopes
We have in our minds an idea of a 'telescope', so this looks at some unconventional telescopes and how they are used to help us explore the universe
